China's is the only Government which cheerfully and publicly buys off its political foes, generally with much heroic haggling. Last week a glorious bargain was finally struck by agents of the shrill little Chinese Generalissimo, wasp-waisted Chiang Kaishek. To get this most vital haggle started the agents had to go to British Hongkong and blandish their way into a strongly built house protected by elaborate iron gratings and guarded day and night by heavily armed Sikh police from India.
Thus entrenched and resolved to sell himself dearly has lived for the past two and a half years Hu Han-min, sometimes called "China's Trotsky." The late, sainted Dr. Sun Yatsen, idolized "Father of the Chinese Revolution," relied for more than a decade upon Hu Han-min as his Chief Secretary and later made him acting Cantonese Generalissimo. To this day South China respects no living Chinese more than Hu Han-min. He has shrewdly traded on the yearning of all Chinese to get back at Japan by hurling repeated rebukes at Generalissimo Chiang for "his spineless failure to adopt a strong policy toward the foreign power which has torn and ravaged our homeland!"
So long as Mr. Hu continued to fulminate, safe behind his Hongkong gratings, the Nanking Government of Generalissimo Chiang, potent chiefly in Central China, despaired of re-establishing its authority in the South. Last week the great haggle ended in a joyous announcement by Nanking Government officials. They had paid Mr. Hu some $200,000, they said, and he has agreed to leave China under pretext of "a detailed inspection tour of European and other countries."
Same day Generalissimo Chiang's bland, stogie-smoking brother-in-law by marriage, Dr. H. H. Kung, 75th lineal descendant of Confucius, returned to Nanking from a haggling expedition in North China. Hopping by airplane from general to general Dr. Kung had apparently cut a swath of bribery broader and more sweeping than any in recent Chinese annals. "I have had unqualified success," he beamed, "in cementing the political bonds of Northern leaders with Nanking."
Taking this at face value and banking heavily on having bought Mr. Hu, Nanking officials claimed that prospects for a united China are now brighter than at any time since the northern part of the nation was spectacularly reconquered by Generalissimo Chiang in 1930.